The page turns to a second week of abundant promise. With Tim Henman it was hope. With Andy Murray it is turning to expectation. There is now nothing blindly chauvinistic about predicting that Britain's No1 can draw a nation to its TV screen a week from now.

Murray is conquering lesser men with his glow of self-assurance. On Centre Court yesterday Viktor Troicki started out as if sitting his driving test and his university finals at once. Some of this might have been down to simple stage fright. But momentum is a force of its own. In his pomp, Murray slows the game down with expert backhand slices and waits for his adversary to unravel. When he needs to, he opens his forehand and crashes the ball beyond reply.

About the only reservation worth barking out is whether the first week was just too easy. The consensus used to be that at least one tough match is desirable while the also-rans are put back on the bus to Nowheresville. Players used to talk about needing a tight five-setter to sharpen the concentration. Murray, though, will have to wait until the best 16 assemble from tomorrow to determine the No1 challenger to Roger Federer, whose sudden tendency to dress like Liberace should not be mistaken for a softening of his resolve.

Strictly speaking, all judgment should be reserved until someone drags Murray into a fight. And they will. Federer is not the only menace left in this draw. But in all his outings so far there has been the sense that Murray is finding out just how good he is, or is going to be. The better he gets, the less energy he expends. "I'm able to raise my game to the quality of the opponent and the sort of situation," he said last night. Troicki is only one place outside the world's top 30, but you would never have known it as Murray's grace and agility blew him back to Serbia.

This has all the makings of the finest 12-month flowering in current British sport. This time last year, heads were bowed and feet shuffled as Nadal subjected him to a game of fetch in a quarter-final. A superficial reading of that thumping was that Murray was in the Henman loop of always finding one too good for him.

That assessment ignored both his age and his potential for acquiring the extra qualities he so obviously lacked. Strength, stamina, power, conviction. Quite a list, when you put it like that, but Murray's mob went off to make sure he added them to his skill set, which was always larger than Henman's. News travels slowly in Wimbledon. The local Woolworth's looks as if the crash never reached its doors. In 12 months, though, Murray has transmogrified from a stringy lad into a rugby-playing type. Not a flank forward, but certainly a centre. Murray is no longer an undergraduate's torso perched on spindly legs.

The prime shift, however, seems to be psychological. The transformation started at last year's US Open, where he beat Nadal to reach his first grand slam final. Even then, he marked his semi-final win by staying on the court too long to celebrate and scribble autographs. The finished warrior would have left the stage to attend to the final conquest.

Murray's view of himself has expanded since then. To reach this tournament's last four on Friday would look like a mere staging post. Now the problem kicks in. He is playing so well this year that to go out before Sunday would seem a sign of terminal fallibility. When Nadal pulled out to nurse his knees, he obliged Murray to spend the full two weeks on the turf where no British man has planted a flag since Fred Perry 73 years ago.

The way this is going, our thoughts will soon turn to what next Sunday would look and feel like should Murray face Federer or AN Other. How big would it be? England's World Cup win in 1966 is believed to have hypnotised 32.3m viewers, 200,000 more than watched Princess Diana's funeral. The national identity is probably too diffuse these days for Murray winning Wimbledon to become a truly coast-to-coast experience, but it would sure repair a leaking tap in our sporting consciousness.

We race ahead of ourselves. Murray has only cuffed away the first-week makeweights. But he has done so without fuss or stress. "I don't feel like I put any extra pressure on myself for this tournament than any other," he said. He is a different animal now, immune to vicarious yearnings.

The time for watching him mature has passed. In this form, he turns away from his best shots without obvious delight. They no longer surprise him. Authority, they call it.